Rick Kogan is feeling festive about Chicago

That annual buffet of words called Printer's Row Lit Fest — I will always prefer its original name, Printers Row Book Fair — takes place Saturday and Sunday, with more than 250 authors spread across 200-some talks, performances, conversations, book-buying and book-selling, and such hybrids as Chicago Live, which I host.

I am involved in four or five other PRLF activities and so will do my best to survive, a task made more difficult because I want to see/hear other writers and maybe buy a few of them a drink.

This section has done a fine job of detailing the many facets of the fest (printersrowlitfest.org). Here are a few more things for you to know.

"Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100+ Years of Chicago and the Movies," by Arnie Bernstein and Michael Corcoran, is a new edition of a book first published in 1998 when Bernstein was, as he writes, "just another Chicago movie nut." He wrote that edition by himself and has since written such fine books as "Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing" and the upcoming "Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund."

In recruiting tour guide, lecturer and fellow "movie nut" Corcoran as his collaborator, Bernstein is justified when he writes "I'm taking great pride and pleasure in seeing my baby all grown up and now a completely different book."

This is a very different, much fuller and livelier book. The pair does more than merely update the original, giving us much good and solid stuff about the early days of movie-making here and engaging stories about the many movies that have been made here over the decades, from the groundbreaking "Call Northside 777" to the ludicrous "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." It introduces us to some of the people who have made movies here (Tom Palazzolo, Harold Ramis), written movies (Tim Kazurinsky), cast movies (Jane Alderman) and acted in them (Joe Mantegna, Irma Hall).

Movie nuts, feel free to rejoice.

It amuses me to no end when mayors and lesser civic boosters do their chest-thumping best to convince us that we are, or argue that we should be regarded as, a world-class city.

Been there, done that and the proof is in a title: "Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America."

Doesn't get more international than "Paris of America," does it?

This is actually an old book, very old. First published in 1893, it was intended as an unofficial guide for those visiting the city to partake of the considerable wonders of the Columbian Exposition. But it is given a fresh and welcome new life and polish by Northwestern University's Bill Savage and the University of Chicago's Paul Durica, a writer and scholar who runs Pocket Guide to Hell Tours.

They write: "We try to strike a balance between re-creating the book as it originally appeared and making it modern," meaning that they have done some copy editing. They leave the text otherwise as it was, and it is great fun to read as it courses from the respectable to the not so respectable.

The pair's notes on words, phrases, people and places in the text are delightfully informative, whether historical, such as "Pine Street: Former name for Michigan Avenue north of the Chicago River"; etymological, as in "guying: 'To guy' is to quiz, chaff, roast or josh. Pleasant, friendly jiving and mockery"; or provocative: "delicious lays: The sexual double-entendre of 'delicious lays … being caroled forth by the song birds' would have been as obvious then as now."

In an ancient ad that ran in the Chicago Tribune in 1893, the original book was touted by its publisher to be "Thrilling as a novel, seductive as a romance."

But the prim and proper paper did not to deign to review it. Consider that injustice remedied.

Gwendolyn Brooks to be honored

For those of you who need an appetizer before the feast that is PRLF, think about starting on Friday with a tribute to the great Gwendolyn Brooks.

Third World Press is joining with The Guild Literary Complex and The American Writers Museum to present the first "Brooksday," a day-long celebration of the work of our city's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist who died in 2000.

The most ardent promoter of this event is writer/teacher Haki Madhubuti, who has been deeply influenced by Brooks, and is founder/publisher of Third World Press.

In his 2011 collection of poetry and prose, "Honoring Genius Gwendolyn Brooks: The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice," Madhubuti writes that Brooks was "an example for us all, a consistent monument in the real, closed eyed to the beauty and strength she radiated … a continuing storm that walks with the English language as lions walk with Africa."

The event will consist of a series of speakers (writers, students, poets, actors, politicians, teachers, cultural and civic leaders … and who knows who else?), each reading five minutes or so of Brooks' work throughout the day at the Chicago Cultural Center. (I am thinking of reading from her wildly under-appreciated 1953 novel "Maud Martha.")

The aim of this is to, of course, celebrate Brooks, but its larger mission is to set the foundation for a grand 100th birthday party in 2017 with, as Madhubuti dreams, multiple sites independently sponsored in public schools, public library branches, colleges and universities.